#RiggingInMaya | Part 1 | Fundamentals | Joints

hello and welcome to a new series where I explore rigging Amaya the plan is to take things back to basics as I go through each element separately so you get a clear understanding of the whole process once the fundamentals have been covered I will then move on to more advanced systems so by the end you will have all the tools you need to build your own complex rigs for the first video I want to go right down to the fundamentals of any rig and those are the joints so in this video we will be looking at joint creation rotation order and gimbal lock joint orientation and segment scale compensate so let's first look at the process of actually creating joints so the first way you can create them is to change your menu setup here to rigging you'll notice that the main menu across the top updates so that the tools more relevant to that area easily selectable as you can see if we switch back to modeling we have edit mesh mesh tools etc we go down to rigging then we have skeleton and skin and deformers so we're just going to go to skeleton create joints and we can go into the options and specify certain things but what we'll do is we'll come back to that later now you'll notice that the cursor has changed to a crosshair and it's this indicates that you're in joint creation mode if I hold down X you'll notice at the top here this icon which allows you to snap to grid turns on and off and that just is when I'm holding down the key so just pressing X is just a shortcut to that if I don't hold down X and click anywhere near a grid point doesn't have to be on the grid point it will automatically snap to the nearest grid point so if I continue to hold X now we've created one joint if I create another one straight away it will automatically parent to the previous one and then I can continue to create joints and they will all be added to the end of the chain and obviously you don't need our necks just when I'm creating joints I like to have this a more precise offset without holding X I can just put them anywhere I want and I can make a joint chain as long as I want so that's just the first way of creating joints the next is to use the shelf we go to the rigging tab you can just select this second icon here double clicking will open up the options and while we're in here let's look at another option and that asymmetry now obviously there are lots of other things to play around with in here but we will look at those later now obviously you've got degree of freedom we're not going to look into that just yet we just want our joints to be able to move and rotate any way any which way so if I switch symmetry to x-axis so the x-axis is going across here we can see you down here if I now again I'm going to hold X if I create a joint here it's going to automatically create one opposite then if I create say an elbow there and a wrist there and then another joint to indicate at the end of the hand as you can see we've created a joint chain here and it's automatically created one over the opposite side what's more is these are connected so I can now move and manipulate them like so and it's automatically updating the joints on the opposite side as well so that's just a neat little addition now if you want to get rid of the connection you'll see here in the outliner we have these symmetry constraints and we're going to look at more we're going to look at constraints a bit more in a future video but just to break that connection you can just delete those constraints and then that just frees these up so that is just the very basics of how to go about creating a joint so what we're going to look at next is the rotation order and also something that's known as gimbal lock and how - well not avoid it but work your way around it so that you don't suffer from it as often as you normally would so we had just have a single joint here and this is just a basic node it's just a transform node as you can see here lots of other nodes in Maya do have shape nodes attached mainly geometry and NURBS curves but a joint you just have a basic transform node and this allows you to move it around rotate it and you can also scale it but as you can see in the viewport the actual joint itself isn't scaling whereas if I scale it up you can see here we have scale values so there is actually some scaling going on now the difference with this is once you get a germ a model attached to the joint so you've attached your vertices painted your weights etc so you basically attach the skin when you scale this it's going to scale the actual skin so it will move the vertices out appropriately so that it's the influence that scales not the actual joint node itself if you want to actually scale the joint the actual joint node here you have a model and you want to scale the joint so they fit around the mesh so that they make a more visual representation you can just go into the channel box and you have a radius value here as you can see we can adjust this on a per joint level so if I create two joints so you can see we can have different scales of joints without actually affecting the scale value if you know what I mean so like I said this is just a visual representation now you can't there isn't the way of globally scaling joints if you go to display animation joint size you'll see here this is set to wand what we can do is we can scale this and this is relative to the actual radius and this is useful if you import if you're working on a rig or your import somebody else's skeleton into your scene and maybe your scene units are different to theirs maybe they're working in centimeters you're working in meters the joints may come through and they'll be either super tiny or they'll be huge now rather than you having to go in and change the radius of each joint you could just adjust the global joint displayer here because the problem you have then is you could save out the skeleton and then they will load it back in and then the same problem will be there for them but this is this is will just stay in your sort of mayor instance really so let's set that back to one so there's a joint and as I've just shown it's just a basic transform node now if we look more closely at the rotation of this if we use the rotate manipulator you see we have this yellow circle around the edges and this just allows you to rotate sort of relative to the camera angle but you can also click anywhere and just drag and you can move this around and what it looks like is the XY and z axes all move nicely around it without any problems now the thing is this isn't entirely true and the way we can see the actual true rotation axes is if we change our manipulator so if I double click on the rotate tool angle icon sorry change this to gimbal now you'll see the only thing that seems to have changed is the yellow circle has disappeared but now you can't click in between any of these axes and rotate it instead you have to click and rotate each axis separately so if I rotate the z-axis everything seems fine everything is following if I rotate the y-axis you will see that only the x-axis is rotating and if we get to a point like this where the X and the Z taxis are pretty much overlapping this is what it's called gimbal lock the problem now we well the problem we have now is although we could rotate this way and we can use X or Z and we can rotate Y this way we can't rotate it around this way because both of these axes are now in the same sort of plane so basically it we're locked off to rotating around this axis here we could you switch back to the object rotation but as I say that's not entirely true and when you come to export this as an animation you may find that there are issues with certain rotations depending on what the joints are going to be so let's switch this back to gimbal and just reset those joints rotation sorry so as we saw Zed affects both of these axes Y is only affecting the x axis and X doesn't seem to affect anything and the way the reason that for that is because of our rotate order over here as you can see this is set to XYZ and this is basically the if you think about it like a hierarchy or if you were setting setting up a group structure so Zed which is at the end is the top of the group structure so that affects Y and X Y is in the middle so that only affects and because X is at the front it doesn't affect anything now it's a bit counterintuitive really these should be the other way around because Z is the more dominant axis but that's just the way it is in Maya so if we change this let's change this to Y Zed X instead so now X should control everything Zed will only control Y and Y will be on its own so Y only on its own Zed just controls Y and X controls everything now this is quite important when you're building rigs to take the time to go through an experiment with the rotation order now you will never eliminate gimbal lock not without some super complicated setup because even by changing this we're still going to end up with a situation as you can see now the Y in X axes are in the same plane and we can't rotate it around this way so no matter what you do you're going to end up with gimbal lock in some sort of situation what you do have to do is consider your priority so if I create another joint much later I'm going to just create them from scratch so create one there so create an elbow there and a wrist and a hand you know and I've gone through and created these manually and we're going to look at this next but because just so that the rotational axes are all pointing down the joint so I can rotate X and the arm is rotating correctly now if I switch this oh well it's already gone back to default so what the problem we've got now is the I can rotate X and that's absolutely fine for our arm if I rotate Z it's going to lower the arm which is fine and if I rotate why the arm is going to move backwards and forwards but the z-axis doesn't so if I wanted to like lift make the arm come out again I've got to rotate at the Zed axis which is going to make it come out at a funny angle you see you'd expect it to come up from this angle but instead it's going to come off at this angle and that's going to cause problems for your animation so if we switch this to Y Zed X for example and you can see the accident because I've got some values on here already the axis is updated to reflect the change in the rotation order as well so that's something else to keep in mind if you have a skeleton that's already got animation applied and you decide that you want to change the rotation order it is going to affect the animation so it's good to get this sorted early on so let's reset this and let's see what happens if we change it so now we can rotate X and that's rotating everything did iges Zed will rotate up and down and Y will move the arm forward and backwards so let's say we want the arm moves down we can still move the arm forwards and backwards but in this instance the x axis isn't working either so we have to go back to the drawing board and try something else so we go to the next one so X rotates that way Zed rotates the arm down we ideally want the arm rotation like this which is rotating down the bone to be the more dominant one so let's try said Y X so X rotates that and that rotates in both with flip the arm up and down and we can rotate backwards and forwards but then they exit do you see what I mean it gets a bit more complicated so let's try another one and it is just a truck a case of trial and error so why we'll move the arm forward and backwards Z up and down and then X rotate like this so this is a much better setup for this particular joint chain we can raise and lower the arm we can then move it forwards and backwards and we can rotate around the X but then we get the problem where the X does that but you get the idea you know it's just trial and error now the way I set up my joint chains is slightly different to this this is just with the default settings so what we will do now is now you've got sort of that process in your head and you know a bit more about the rotation order and the things that you need to play around with let's now take a break and investigate the joint orientations and then we can come back to this and look at sort of setting up a basic to drink chain so what I want to talk about now is the actual joint orientation so as you can see if I create a joint and I create a second joint the first will automatically orientate itself to be pointing to the next joint like so X is pointing down to the elbow pointing down to the wrist then pointing to the end of the hand which is then orientated to the actual the same axis as the world with Zed forward X pointing to the side and Y pointing vertically and it does that automatically for you but let's just duplicate this joint here and let's move this down here one parent it so it's on its own now if we did that manually so trying to say similar sort of so we're duplicating our joints like Serbs and then we parent them manually you'll see that the rotational axes are all incorrect they're all matching the world and this is wrong because if we now just switch this back to object if we rotate this arm here you'll see that the up the upper arm rotates nicely around around this axis and you get a more natural movement whereas if we rotate this one you see it doesn't rotate correctly if I move that arm down to the hand down to there and the hand down to there you'll see this even more you see the hand moves out of the way which isn't what you want when you're rigging you want the joints to all the orientated so they're pointing to the child joint so you get a nice rotation around the main primary axis now one of the problem with the orientations is when you're building a skeleton and just like we have here we decided to move the hand manually and this happens all the time you may come in and think oh well I've just created this joint I'm gonna move it up here that's fine we're skinned it but the problem is the orientation you see is still pointing to where the wrist was previously so that causes another problem there so how do you go about fixing the orientations well what I'm going to do first is I'm just going to select these joints I'm going to go to display transform local rotation axes and this is just going to show us the actual axes that the rotation plane is working with we can clearly see the x axis here which should be pointing down to the wrist is broken and the ones on here are all broken - now you can't fix these easily we can just go to skeleton orient joint and open up this option here just reset it so this is set up with the default options so it's X pointing down the bone Y pointing up and Z pointing forward so essentially what we could do is just click click the route joint click apply and as you can see it's orientated that down to the jaw elbow joint and then it's also fixed all the children joints underneath that one other thing that we need to do is where I'm just going to move the the end of the hand there because if you see if I we've now broken it again so the wrist joint isn't pointing to the end of the hunt if I click apply again that's fixed the wrist but it's not done anything to the end of the hand and we effectively we want that to match the orientation of the wrist and because this doesn't have a joint to point towards it just it remains back with the world sort of axis but what you can do is you can just see a orient joint to world click apply and that will just orient it will try and match the orientation of the parent joint because it's using the orientation of the parent rather than the world so even though it says are in joint two world it's orientating it to the parent so that's just a quick way of getting all the joints to line up nicely you know in our work so if I clicks like this one and just using the default values and let's say I only wanted to affect the elbow joint here I could just turn off orient children of selected joints and that will only affect the selected joint I have none of the children but then I have to go in and do them one at a time whereas I could just keep that enabled select the rubes and click apply and then I want to fix the end joint here so again orient joint to world click apply and that just matches it just keeps everything nicely aligned with the hand because we could then add fingers on to that and they would all be following the same sort of axis so you'll get a nicer rotation but what if you didn't want X down the bone what if you needed Y down the bone which a lot of my clients normally ask for when they're using an unreal engine they need Y down the bone so what you can do is again use this so we know that our primary axis is going to be Y so we can set that to Y and then we can click apply and that switches it so Y is now pointing down the bone Zed is up and X is out in front so that's the primary axis that will always point down the bone now the secondary axis and the secondary axis world orientation both work together so at the moment this is saying I want the secondary axis to me my z axis but I want it to follow the worlds y axis so effectively the world axis is pointing up so we set that to Y so we we're basically saying I want Y down the bone but I want Z to point up now what if we want to Z to point forward I could set that to Zed click apply and Zed is now pointing forward as you can see you can also if you want Zed to point backwards instead because obviously we said we want Zed to point forward but there isn't an option to specify it pointing backwards we can just set that to minus click apply now Z is pointing the opposite way so that that's just a quick overview of the Orient joint tool now I'm going to go back and open up the joint options as you can see this also exists in the main options so if you know from the outset which orientation you need to use you can just set it up in here so when you're originally creating your joints so if we try and mimic this so we want Y down the bone Zed pointing up but we all know we want the z-axis to be the secondary axis and we want Z to also point backwards if I set this to minus so if I click X and just hold down the joint the if I hold down X or the joints restrict to the grid so if we do that we can see if I just select those and also in the main Orion joint option you can toggle the axis this way rather than going up to display but you can see setting that up in the main tool has just done that for me so I don't then have to go back afterwards and redo it all myself because originally from the outset I've just defined that anyway or we will have to do is go to and manually do the end joints but we set our in joint world click apply and that just matches the rest so that is how to fix the orientations of your joints so what I want to do now is take everything we've learned so far and sort of use it in a more practical sense so you can basically see how I would adjust and fix the joints on a skeleton now we already have seen how to create the skeleton so that's quite an easy setup so I've brought in a basic arm skeleton that I've built now let's pretend that this has been given to me by another artist or it's been exported from some motion-capture awesome like that and basically what I need to do is clean this up and apply an arm rig to it so add all the controls and then skin the arm geometry to the model to the skeleton sorry so let's just have a look at this skeleton now I can select the root of the skeleton there and I can see that the rotational axis isn't working now the first thing I would do is I would just double check that I am actually in object mode for the orientation not world because if I'm in world then no matter what I select the manipulator will match the world orientation so I'm making sure I'm in objects base and I can see that the rotational axes are all reset so the first thing I'll do is select hierarchy display transform display local rotational axes and there I can see definitely yes they've all been reset so if the animator wanted to rotate the elbow it's not rotating around the right axis that way the same with the shoulder you see it's just not going to work from an animation point of view and the wrist as well we could animate like this but it's just not going to give back nice rotational values so the first thing I need to do is go in and fix this so I'm going to skeleton or end joint tool now what I've also been told is Y needs to point down the bone and we also need to have the Zed axis pointing forward and the x axis pointing well pointing down so the first thing I would do so we know we need Y pointing down the bone so primary accesses Y and we want the Zed axis pointing forward so we'll set that to Zed as well so the Zed axis should follow the world Zed axis and that is pointing forward if I click apply now as you can see that's gone through all the joints and fix them why would do then is just go in and make sure they rotate correctly because sometimes if the z-axis is supposed to point forward depending on the orientation of the parent and child joints it can sometimes may be point up slightly or down slightly but this looks like it's worked out okay so I can flap the arm twist the arm and move the arm forwards and backwards so that's looking good if I come down here to where the wrist is we can see there's a problem with the rest the axis has been reset but it's not pointing to the elbow so if I was to try and rotate this I'm going to have problems because I want to be able to flatly have the arm up and down much much like I can with the elbow now obviously your real elbow doesn't move like that but you get the idea I want the wrist to flap up and down like that so what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to unparent the fingers I'm going to cut got it on perón and now I can select the rest go to orient joint to world and click apply so that has now matched the elbow which is giving me exactly the orientation I need and then I can go back in here and parent those back to the wrist so now the wrist flaps up and down just as I want rotates exactly as I need it to and we can also rotate it that way and that is perfect so now I'm just going to check the fingers and they look okay now because we've changed the wrist I'm just going to double check by reapplying that and that seems to be okay I'll do the thumb as well and again we have these end joints so I'm going to select all those just so they all match the joints below them and that is fine so what looking at the finger I know that the z-axis is going to rotate the fingers in I select all those rotate them in like so we got a nice finger curl but what we also need is for the z axis on the thumb to also rotate to curl the thumb in whereas if I rotate these Zed axis now see the thumb bends are completely the wrong way so instead we want it to rotate that way so we need to fix those orientations so the thumb rotates in a more predictable way so basically when you're setting up your rig later you only need to worry about connecting the z axis rather than having to connect a completely different axis that for the thumb so in this instance we're just going to set that up differently so previously we had Y bar down the bone the z axis pointing up well there's Ed axis pointing forward because we wanted the z axis to point towards the front but instead we want the x axis to point forward this time so I'm going to change that to X click apply so now if I rotate the Zed axis I select all the joints you see now the thumb curls in and that's just using this joint orientation and again we can just go in and just fix that in joint quickly just so everything rotates you know and he's orientated exactly the same so that's the arm setup we've got the orientations all fixed now one thing you may want to do is let's say let's say this thumb it rotates in like that which is fine but maybe it's just not at the right angle now obviously using this tool we can't it's quite rigid so we can't sort of change the orientations so they're more at a 45 degree angle rather than 90 degree angles themselves so I'm just going to close that down now you can manually edit the joint orientations so what I'm going to do is come up to select by component type here it's like that go over to the question mark right click and click local rotation axes and this allows me to select these like so and we can say well if it's rotating around the z axis that way maybe we want the thumb to point down a little bit so I can rotate that like so go back into object mode and then see the thumb is now rotating a bit further down so that's much better and much more what we needed well much more closer to what we needed the problem then is if we look at the axis on the normal fingers the rotational axis is like this and the transform axis matches it whereas now because we've manually edited the rotational axes as you can see the transform is pointing slightly up because we've not actually edited the transform axis axis we've only edited the rotation the rotation is matching this but the translation is off and what we've ended up with is this value on the routier axis now this can cause problems when you're exporting to a game engine because because we've got this offset it can affect your animation and it can also break things as they're moving moving around just because of this offset here ideally we want these to be 0 out now the problem is er I know how to fix this using a script but I've not yet found a way of doing it using the mayor tools up here the orient tool you can turn off reorient the local scale axes but it's just going to reset it so if I click apply like that see that doesn't really work either you can go to modify freeze transforms and we can maybe just do the joint orient but you can see that's just reset that as well now the way that I would fix this is by using a bit of code if I go here it's just joint edit and I think if I just double check this joint edit zero scale orient so if I just highlight that and press Enter you see the transform manipulator now matches the rotation axes and zeroed out these values here so if I go up to the the knuckle and run that again see that's fixed it and we've got rid of these values so I can just go down and just zero those out just as a precaution and it just means I've got a much cleaner rig and I know that it's not going to pop cause problems down the line which is going to involve us having to rebuild the rig and edit it and fix it which in turn could possibly mean that the animators have to redo some animation work so it's good if you have to go in and manually edit the rotational axes just use that little bit of code there just to go through and reset those rotate axes values so that's all setup and that is ready to rig but what I'm also going to do is I'm going to go through and update the rotation order just as we did before so what we need is a priority so I'm going to change this to gimbal so I can see precisely what's going to happen so the moment is on the default of X Y Z so Z will flap like so Y will rotate and X moves forward and backwards now in itself that doesn't work too badly although if you move the arm forward then that doesn't really work and the Y doesn't really work so what I'm going to do is change this to Y set X and this is sort of the setup that I normally use the same with how these orientations are set on the arm so now as you can see we can rotate Z to flap Y will twist it and then X moves forwards and backwards again you will never get an absolutely perfect setup but this is what I normally use when I'm building my rigs the problem we have now is we've got girls through and we've got to change that for every single joint or you could have one rotation order for the shoulder and a different one for the elbow because obviously the elbow is only gonna rotate in that axis so it may be that you know the default works but obviously just looking at that rotating around the x-axis it's not gonna work for the elbow because none of the other axes move so Y Zed X works nicely there now again I'm just going to use a bit of code because imagine we've only got an arm but why if you've got two arms two legs with tours you've got a full tour so you've got facial joints you could have all sorts of joints and you've got a girl through click these one by one but instead I'm just going to use a bit of curd and this is just a bit of Python one of my usual scripts now the the way that I would go about figuring this out is just if we say that to the default which is what it was X Y Z if we change that to the first one which is the one we want it set to Y Zed X we can see here that it's set at rope attribute left humerus dot wrote a order to want so all we need to do is repeat that command on each joint and change the rotation order to want so all this is doing is that so this joint list is basically storing this command and what this is doing if I just run the command on its own it's getting a list of all the joints in the scene so down here we've then got a for loop so basically for each joint in the joint list and this joint is just part of the name so we're just saying joint in joint list so this could be if if our list was called skeleton list it would be for skeleton in skeleton list and then we're just repeating the command but obviously this has been converted to Python so we're just using setattribute which is that the name of our joint which is a variable which is getting picked out of this list and then we're adding on the rotate order and then we're setting that value so we want it set to set to one so if I now select press ENTER to run this all our joints are set to Y Zed X which is rotate R to one so that is just you know that is how I would approach it just speeds things up a lot more and this is a very simple script and you can adapt this to update any attribute let's say you want inherit transform turned off as you can see we would just take that part of this inherit transform replace it the rotate order with that and set that to zero and then that will go through every joint in the see and you know set the attribute for us on that joint I don't want to do that but you know that's just an example so there we have our arm set up all ready to go the only additional thing that we may want to do now we've gone through and we've set up this arm is to create this is a left arm we may want to then create the right arm and we can use a tool in Maya just to simply mirror the joints the thing is we need a joint to act as the central point so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to create a joint turn that off in the middle of the grid I'm just going to increase the radius just so we can see it and I'm gonna parent the clavicle to that like so now that is just a dummy joint but you may have except so you've already got a spine in the scene all I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to skeleton mirror joints and what you can do in here is handli all my left hand joints have an el underscore prefix so this tool will search for everything with an owl and replace it with our so that's going to do it for us and I'm going to mirror it a proc across the y z axis so if I click apply that has created the right hand side joints as you can see and it's replaced all the names with our so that has updated that nicely now this has mirrored it by behavior so what that will do as you can see if I'm raising the left clavicle it's gonna raise the right clavicle if I raise and lower the left arm left shoulder sorry it's a left humerus as this is called then it's going to match the orientation or the rotation on the other side so that's quite a nice way of setting it up again it means if your animator is rotating this you know to a plus value of 41 a plus value of 41 is going to do the same on the other side so it just speeds up their workflow as well and it also means if you are you could animate one arm and then you can copy the animation from one arm to the other arm and it's going to work correctly and all that behavior is done because you are telling it to mirror the behavior as you can see here the rotational axes have been twisted around so that it is a true sort of mirrored representation so that I've just gone through what we've learned so far and applied it to an arm skeleton like I said in the beginning acting as if somebody sent this skeleton to me that's been exported from another package or it could be motion capture where everything's being reset on it and you're just going through and fixing it so it's at stage where it's ready to apply a rig so there's one more attribute that I wanted to discuss and that is segment scale compensate now this does tend to cause issues particularly if you're working on a game rig depending on which game engine you're using it's also a attribute which if you're aware of it can make your rigs a lot more flexible now by default it's turned on and what this means is if I go to scale so let's just select the wrist as you can see as we talked about at the very beginning of the video if I scale this it's scaling the vertices that are influenced by that joint so like so and at the moment this looks wrong because with this scaled up these finger joints aren't actually scaling - and that is because segment scale compensate is enabled so basically that's telling the joint to try and apply an offset so it doesn't scale with its parent joint now as you know if you're you know familiar with creating hierarchies and modeling if you group something to something else or parent something to something else if you scale a parent the object underneath are the note underneath scales with it it's all relative but this being enabled here means that the fingers retain their scale now that like I said before this can cause problems but it can also give you a lot more freedom if I wanted to let's say we wanted a rig let's just set this back to one let's say I wanted to rig where I wanted to have the flexibility to scale a hand size or to scale the head size at the moment scaling this joint doesn't work but what we could do instead is we could disable segment scale compensate on the joints below the wrist now if I scale this you'll see the hand scales and the finger scales with it in a more sort of predictable manner now just like before with the rotation order we've got to go through and we've got a enable this on all the joints while all the joints that are relevant to the hand because we we don't really want it involved you know up here or anything so or you may want it if you want a more flexible rig but there are instances where if you want to scale the arm for example if you're adding in stretchy limbs that you want it enabled because you want the limb to stretch but you don't want the arm to stretch if you know what I mean but yeah we can just go back to let's open the script editor so before we use this if you remember to change that attribute so if I go in here turn off segment scale compensate so we know that we want the attribute so I can copy that paste that there and we can set that to zero and then that's just going to do it on all the joints so that but that is going to do it on all the joints in the scene but like I say you may only want it on a select few so now if I select the wrist you know we've got a nice flexible rig where we can have a big hand or a tiny hand and that just fixed that fixes that issue but like I say maybe if you are setting it up with stretchy limbs you won't want the arm to stretch the hand to stretch to so we may want to just turn that on for the actual wrist itself and as you can see I look from this direction now with that armed the arm will stretch but the hand will stay as it is so in some instances it's really handy to have that on and that's why it's on by default if it wasn't on on the wrist then if the album scaled the hand would scale with it and if you want more control over your rig then you will want those separate so yeah that's just an extra attribute I wanted to discuss because it's something that crops up a lot as I'm building rigs and I think it's quite useful if not if you're not going to use it it's good to be aware of it because if a problem comes up further down the line then this could be what is causing it so it's good to keep that in mind so we've come to the end of this first video now what we've done is we've looked at the joint creation rotation order and how to avoid gimbal lock we've also investigated joint orientation and also segment scale compensate and why as I say I'm just going over the very basics for now just to get you familiar with joints and how to set them up and some of the options associated with setting them up or building your first skeleton what we're going to do in the next video is we're going to move on a step and we're going to look at connections and constraints so if you've enjoyed this video please subscribe so you are kept up to date future videos in this series and I will see you on the next video you you

Channel: antCGi

Views: 119,744

Keywords: rigging, maya, rigging in maya, basics, fundamentals, joints, skeleton, orient joint, rotate axis, gimbal, lock, symmetry, rotate order, axis, axes, python, mel, segment scale compensate, scale, radius, joint orientation, menu set, shelf, tips, help, tutorial, fix orient, fix axis, arm rig, 2019, maya 2019, gamedev, game art, game development, game rig, game rigging, beginner

Id: urC_TBQQA7o

Length: 51min 5sec (3065 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/blueSGL]

N.B. this is not my video.

I found this series by antCGI and it covered in depth some aspects that had not been covered in other tutorials I'd seen so I thought I'd share.